Monday, April 30, 2012

For a long time I use a sheet to work up revenues and troop strength whenever I needed to know that information. I developed it in the early nineties starting with various Harn materials including Battlelust, Harnmanor, and Shorkyne.

To use the worksheet you need to supply the number of manor/estates for each major settlement. The number of urban households, and the sheet calculates the rest. You can also enter the land quality if you like. 1.0 represents average fertile soil. Lower numbers represent poor soils. Higher numbers better soils. Insert a row in the settlement portion of the sheet to add more settlements.

My general philosophy is to try to use real world units and concepts as much as possible. But use the law of averages to make something that is usable especially for something large as a entire realms.

The current limitation of the worksheet is that it is oriented towards feudal societies and would look very different in a imperial society, viking, etc. Especially in the military section. I still haven't settled in my mind how to deal with those types of societies yet.

Money Assumptions
All revenue is given in silver pennies
One silver penny is equal to one D&D silver piece
One silver penny is equal $4 of GURPS money
One gold crown is equal to 320 silver penny
d is the symbol for 1 silver penny

Revenue Assumptions
Each Urban Household averages 100d of revenue
Each Rural Household generate 1/4d of revenue
Each Rural Manor generates 1d per acre of revenue
Note this is the monies paid to the liege and represents net income NOT gross income.
Different cultures will divide the net income in different ways. The worksheet provides the base numbers to work with.

Military Assumptions
One yeoman per 900 acres of land
12% of urban household has yeoman training
A further 1 in 6 urban households has militia training

Every manor provides a knight fee
60% of Knight fee will be given in person
40% of Knight fee will be given in scutage (money)

Levies serve three months
A Knight Fee is worth one of the following
2400d
1 Knight
5 Yeoman 10% of knight's fee will send 5 yeoman instead of a knight

Knight's Affinty
A Knight Affinty is his retinue of men
50% of knights will have a heavy horse
the rest will have a medium horse
1/3 of knight bring a squire
25% of Squires of a knight with a heavy horse will have a heavy horse
the rest will have a medium horse
10% of the knights will bring an average of 1.5 yeoman (1 to 2)

The general yeomanry is raised separately from the call up of knights.

The costs are support costs
The levy may be supplemented with paid troops
The levy may be supplemented with the militia however this threatens the harvest
Mercenaries use the Yeoman Chart
Support costs are broken out to show the minimum needed to keep an army in the field.

A manor is a estate with a hamlet or small village attached to it. The diamonds are larger market villages which are generally found within a cluster of ten or so manors. The manors are usually a 1/4 to 1/2 day travel from the market village. roughly 5 to 10 miles away.

Not to bother but more questions. I'm curious what the 1d per acre represents when you already have income from the household living in that acreage. Also, what does the LQ represent and why does it only affect this money per acre?

Finally, I'm guessing that the map is 5 miles per hex and, by my calculation, you could fit a bit over 9 manors in each hex (at maximum cultivation). I'm so used to things like B10 where you have two towns and one villages in an area over 10,000 sq miles. Is there a general rule about what percentage of the area of a hex is treated as usable acreage for these calculations?

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.